an interview with sister mary corita

National Art Education Association

An Interview with Sister Mary CoritaAuthor(s): Vincent LanierSource: Art Education, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Feb., 1965), pp. 10-14Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190674 .

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VINCENT LANIER

A PRETTY, LAUGHING GIRL carries a large sign with bold red letters spelling: "I like God." Another holds up a similar placard which states: "God likes me." Black and white gowned nuns wear garlands of brightly colored flowers in the shape of crowns over their headdresses. All around are large color photographs of food and moving, smiling people. Surrealist cinema? Not at all, for this was a film of a religious day celebration at Immaculate Heart College in the city of Los Angeles and showed the magic touch of Sister Magdalen Mary IHM and Sister Mary Corita IHM, who together have, since 1954, built up the art department at the college to a level of national recognition.

Sister Mary Corita, who is the subject of this article, is small in size, but the delicacy of her appearance is negated by the electricity of her personality. Sister Corita sparkles as she moves around to do things; indeed, even when sitting still there is movement and energy implicit in her manner. And every bit of that movement and energy is purposeful and fruitful. Nun, teacher, and artist, she lives the life of service she is com- mitted to with a zest to be envied by those absorbed with problems of "self." For her, the measure of self and the creation of self is in doing, an ancient yet singularly modern creed.

Sister Corita was born in Iowa, but her family moved to Los Angeles while she was still a child and she grew up in the pre-smog sunshine of southern California. She attended parochial schools in that city and slowly developed her early interest in making things. She characterizes the formal art education of her youthful school years as typical and observes that those who, like her, mature with a driving interest in art, cannot be stopped merely by inadequate training. Enter- ing the convent at eighteen, Sister Corita prepared at Immaculate Heart College to be an elementary teacher and for almost four years after her gradua- tion in 1941 she was a classroom teacher of young children in Canada, part of the time in the historic one room schoolhouse. In 1949 she was assigned to the Immaculate Heart College art department, joining Sister Magdalen Mary. She notes with amusement her disappointment at being sent to her new post. "At the time," she remarked, "being sent to teach art in a college seemed a ridiculous way to spend one's time."

All during her formative years she had been sustaining her interest in art with intermittent coursework at Otis Art Institute, Woodbury Col- lege, Chouinard Art Institute, and had obtained

a Master's degree in Art History at the University of Southern California. The focus of her interest in art was in lettering, not only from the aspect of calligraphy but in the sense of using letters in and as design. She dates the beginning of her professional status as an artist as 1951 when she won first prize at the county and state fairs for one of her serigraphs. This encouragement helped to sustain and mature her love of serigraphy for which she is now known both in the United States and abroad.

I met Sister Corita for the first time at the National Art Education Association Conference in Los Angeles in 1957 where she and Sister Magdalen Mary were given the unenviable responsibility of organizing the commercial exhibits. At the time, some local art educators were puzzled by conference chairman John Olsen's choice of nuns to handle the world of commerce, but in short order changed their opinions. Both sisters man- aged by unfailing good humor, an unerring sense of design, and superb energy and efficiency to organize a commercial exhibition of an esthetic quality seldom seen before that time or since, and to provide more than their share of the almost eleven thousand dollars of profit the conference returned to its parent organization. This was rendering unto Caesar . . . , with a vengeance. Much the same drive and capability has built the Immaculate Heart College art department into a vital center for experimenting with the new and the different in the art world. Sister Corita rue- fully bemoans the unfortunate shortage of college space for the department, but what space there is, is very much in use. From the sunny patio to the furniture-crowded classrooms and store rooms, every possible wall, shelf, and corner is full of student art work, professional art work, and literally, thousands of "folk art" items ranging from a hurdy-gurdy (without organ grinder or monkey) in perfect working order to hundreds of dolls from a variety of cultures.

This absorption in the art of the non-professional reflects both a departmental and personal attitude, well enough supported by awareness of literary sources, to be called a philosophy of art. To Sister Corita, the visual arts can be situated in everything that man makes as long as he makes it with an eye to its beauty. In this she takes her cue from Dewey, specifically Art as Experience, which she considers the most viable description of esthetic experience. It is this attitude of the catholicity of art (if I may be forgiven a play on words) combined with the belief that "the work of



At right, Sister Corita (seen with the author in the bottom photo). Three of her serigraphs done

in 1964 are reproduced in this issue: on page 10, "Our Father;" this page, "As Witnesses to the

Light;" page 14,"That They May Have Life." By kind permission of the Sister, a portion of

"Our Father" is shown on our cover, printed in the colors available for this issue.



* Corita taught her students and made her serigraphs in this manner. In fact, she confesses to an uneasiness with books and people who fragment the processes of human behavior in art, the total of which, she feels, is very much more than the sum of its parts. In this she exemplifies the doer and the maker of things and the impatience of such a person with the necessarily uncommitted observer.

I asked Sister Corita if she could pinpoint the W Ml ideological sources of her art. Her answer was

again typically unified rather than piecemeal. She ~, ^ said that her ideas came from the people around

% * her-the community in which she lived and her students-, her religion, and those aspects of the contemporary art world which "made the most noise." She pictured her role as a teacher in somewhat the same way. Drawing quickly with her pencil she diagrammed her idea in this fashion:

JU ART WORLD --> TEACHER --> STUDENT

When I asked her which group in the art world UII/ of today "made the most noise," she responded

E unhesitatingly, "the pop artists." She admired their passion for the new in art and their willing- ness to accept every form, no matter how mun-

art itself is a new thing each time you make it," which permeates her serigraphs and the art work in many media of the students in the department. Sister Corita is not only unafraid of new ideas, but, indeed, encourages them, though sometimes to no avail. As an example, she described to me the initial ideas of the faculty and students about activities on the celebration day, the final product of which appeared in the film mentioned earlier. At first it was suggested that mass be held in the supermarket across the street from the college and that the parade with banners and placards encircle the street intersection led by a bagpiper. Although this original plan was somewhat constrained by the college, the fact that the ideas originated at all is a reflection of the consistent freshness of approach which is so large a part of Sister Corita's mode of behavior both as a teacher and as an artist. Today, this orientation is characterized by the term "creative," but even before the concept became the hallmark of the art educator, Sister

dane, as a visual resource. Looking at her recent serigraphs reveals the impact of this most recent way of art on her work, and how her ideas do indeed stem from the world around her. Con- cerned, as every good person should be, with the hunger of the world, her most recent theme is food, and her prints boldly and handsomely trans- mit the message. All of the origins of her work which she could isolate in words are manifested in these prints; the love of letters, interest in the working world and the marketplace, compassion for people, awareness of the current world of art, and an eagerness to find new ways to frame her expression. All of these, tied together by a formidable technical command of her medium, give Sister Corita's art an undeniable vitality. One can like it or dislike it, understand it or reject it, respect it or disdain it, but one cannot ignore it.

I asked Sister Corita how she looked at the future of art, but she was reluctant to predict. Going back to her diagrammed conception of her role as a teacher, she pointed to the lack of available situations for today's young artist to work with the mature artist within the framework of historical apprenticeship. Because of this lack, she felt the need for the teacher of art to connect the student with the artist of today, to see what is being done and to try to explain why it is done and what the artist is thinking about, even before the student develops a knowledge of what went on in the past. If the approach of the dominant art 13



group does not last but changes to another major direction, the student must shift over to learn from the newer group. As an example of the inability to make this shift, she noted that some of her own students who are "dyed-in-the-wool abstract expressionists" and who cling to that approach as the way art should look, do not realize that their attitude is exactly the same as those who refuse to accept abstract expressionism.

To this extent, therefore, Sister Corita does visualize the future in art as a changing picture and the responsibility of the artist, the teacher, and the student to learn to change with that future, to "keep present" as she put it.

As one aspect of keeping present, Sister Corita is intensely interested in all film media, recognizing the persuasive value of photography in our time. One wall of the classroom in which we talked was covered with perhaps a hundred full page black and white photographs from Life magazines which her students were asked to pin in rank order from the artistically weakest to the strongest. With exer- cises such as this, Sister Corita hopes to guide the student into some insightful response to the film media so abundantly spewed forth by our technology and our commercialism. Confident that such insight can transfer to other forms of visual art, she notes that film, in the form of photography, cinema, and television, "is art" in today's world simply because of its universality. For the teacher of art to reach the child, perhaps no better way can be found than to capitalize on the child's constant exposure to a visual medium.

In addition to her admonition to "keep present," Sister Corita had some sharp words, (albeit, gently stated) for the teacher of art who makes art "precious" for the "few and terribly special" of his students. It is for this reason that art is legitimately the first curriculum area to be threatened with extinction in a time of stress. Instead of this preciousness, art should be for everyone, a part of being human, like learning to speak, and the point at which the art educator can do the most good is precisely that point at which the many in our schools can learn to identify art as a significant aspect of their own humanity.

I cannot refrain from describing my image of 14 Sister Corita which took shape from our talk. I

r

ENRICHED BREAD

was reminded constantly of the Renaissance man who was, or aspired to be, many things at once. Sister Corita is many things at once: nun, teacher, artist and thinker, and unlike many of us she does not compartmentalize her several universes of action. Instead, they are all one, feeding each other in their unity. By this oneness of existence she manages ably to transcend some of the shib- boleths of our contemporary culture. She is both inner-directed and other-directed, both practical and theoretical, both conscious of history and yet future-oriented. Thus, not the least of the many lessons that Sister Corita can teach to those about her is taught by example and is not particularly related to art. It is well expressed in the words of Dewey, "in an experience, things and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through its intercourse with things previously external to it."

Dr. Lanier, author of a very recently published text on art education at the secondary school level, is head of the Department of Art Education in the School of Education at the University of Southern California.



an interview with sister mary corita

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